Multi-agent systems (MAS) have become an increasingly important
area of research, not least because of the advances in the
Internet and Robotics. However multi-agent systems can become very
complicated, and, consequently, reasoning about the behaviour of
such systems can become extremely difficult. Therefore, it is
important to be able to formalise multi-agent systems and, to do
so in such a way that allows automated reasoning about agents'
behaviour. The purpose of this Special Issue is to present
techniques, based on computational logic (CL), for reasoning about
multi-agent systems in a formal way. This is clearly a major and
exciting challenge for computational logic. We have to develop
techniques to deal with real world issues and applications. We
solicit papers that address CL-related formal approaches to
multi-agent systems . The approaches as well as being formal must
make a significant contribution to the practice of multi-agent
systems. Relevant techniques include the following (but are not
limited to):

We are expecting full papers to describe original, previously
unpublished research, be written in English, and not be
simultaneously submitted for publication elsewhere (previous
publication of partial results at workshops with informal
proceedings is allowed). Papers should be formatted according to
the Instructions for AMAI submissions (to be found at
http://www.kluweronline.com/issn/1012-2443 ) and should be between
20 and 40 pages long: We also require the following issues to be
addressed:

CL: An introduction that includes statements about how the
paper addresses the exploitation of CL for MAS;
MAS: An explanation of which aspect/functionality of MAS the
paper formalises;
Examples: Example(s) which give an intuitive motivation and
explanation of the formalisation.

Please submit a PostScript or PDF file of your paper to
dix@cs.man.ac.uk by the 1st of October 2002.

Important Dates:

Submission Deadline: October 1, 2002
Author Notification: December 15, 2002
Final Paper Deadline: February 15, 2003
Special Issue: September 2003

About the Special Issue Editors:

Jürgen Dix is a Reader at The University of Manchester, UK. He is
also member of the CS Department at the Technical University of
Vienna, where he is lecturing regularly. He worked since 1989 in
several areas of Computational Logic (nonmonotonic reasoning,
logic programming, deductive databases, knowledge representation)
and, lately, also in Multi-Agent Reasoning.

Joćo Alexandre Leite is a researcher at the Center for Artificial
Intelligence (CENTRIA), New University of Lisbon, Portugal. He has
been doing research on logic programming and non-monotonic
reasoning, with particular emphasis on the problem of representing
and reasoning about dynamic knowledge, and its application to
multi-agent systems.

Ken Satoh is a professor of National Institute of Informatics,
Japan. He has been doing research on theoretical foundations of AI
such as nonmonotonic reasoning, preference-based reasoning and
case-based reasoning. He is also interested in formalization of
multi-agent systems and application of the above reasoning to
multi-agent systems.

About Annals of Math and AI:

Annals of Mathematics and Artificial Intelligence (AMAI) is
devoted to reporting significant contributions on the interaction
of mathematical and computational techniques reflecting the
evolving disciplines of artificial intelligence. Annals of
Mathematics and Artificial Intelligence publishes edited volumes
of original manuscripts, survey articles, monographs and well
refereed conference proceedings of the highest caliber within this
increasingly important field. All papers will be subject to the
peer reviewing process with at least two referees per paper.